1. Field
The following description relates to a robot cleaner which effectively travels about a cleaning area and a control method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, a robot cleaner is an apparatus which cleans a designated cleaning area, such as a house or an office, while autonomously traveling about the cleaning area. The robot cleaner includes, in addition to elements of a vacuum cleaning device to draw in dust or foreign substances, a traveling device allowing the robot cleaner to travel, an obstacle sensor to sense obstacles, a battery to supply power, and a microprocessor to control the overall operation of the robot cleaner.
The robot cleaner, through the above-described configuration, judges distances to various obstacles installed in the cleaning area, and executes cleaning while traveling so as not to collide with the obstacles using the judged information. Such a robot cleaner is designed to autonomously recognize the cleaning area so as to execute cleaning of the entire designated cleaning area and to divide already cleaned regions and non-cleaned regions from each other so as to thoroughly clean the cleaning area.
Cleaning using the robot cleaner is carried out using a random sweep method, a pattern sweep method, and a cell sweep method. In the random sweep method, a motion, such as rotation or straight traveling, is randomly determined based only on obstacle information recognized by the obstacle sensor. In the pattern sweep method, whether or not an obstacle is present is judged using information recognized by the obstacle sensor, a position of the robot cleaner is recognized, and thus the robot cleaner executes cleaning while traveling along a specific pattern. In the cell sweep method, a cleaning area is predetermined and the predetermined cleaning area is cleaned using the pattern sweep method.
The above-described robot cleaner stops to change a traveling direction thereof during traveling, and the amount of time required to clean an area increases as the number of times that the robot cleaner stops increases.